If we are striving to be a Christian, most of our daily living is occupied with resisting the world, our fleshly nature, and the devil. We battle against lust, hatred, covetousness, pride, idolatry, jesting, unthankfulness, selfish ambition, and so forth. Such temptations are common to people—Christians and non-Christians alike.

When we overemphasize our legal position in Christ our testimony may become intellectual, doctrinaire, static. There is too much fussing about words and verses and not enough pressing forward in the spiritual combat that characterizes the Christian warfare.

When, on the other hand, we overemphasize our actual experience of living the overcoming life, we may tend to lose the anchor, foundation, and regenerative guiding force and principle of Christianity, which is identification with the crucifixion and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. If we are not careful we can become discouraged while struggling against sin, not accepting the victory won for us by Christ.

If the Christian is to live the overcoming life, one of conquest over temptations, challenges, and pressures, and if he is to progress toward the character transformation and consistent dwelling with the Godhead that are part of the plan of redemption, then he must develop a balance in his life between the legal position in Christ and the actual experience in Christ.

The correct concept of the position of our old nature is that we have been crucified with Christ. Our task is to maintain by faith this attitude toward ourselves and our problems whether or not our actual circumstances and patterns of behavior reveal that we indeed are dead and risen with Christ.

It does no good to keep "digging up the grave" in order to see if we really have been planted in death with Christ. We are to take by faith the legal, doctrinal, visionary position that our natural man, our old nature, has been crucified with Christ and our new born-again inward nature has been raised with Him. Then we are to leave the rest with God. We have been obedient to His Word. The remainder is His responsibility.

Growing in grace means we are closing the gap between what God has declared about us and what other people can see to be true. Maturity in Christ is that condition in which our legal position before God is identical with our actual experience of being crucified and resurrected with Christ; of being in the image of Christ; of being in Christ and Christ in us; of being fruitful; and of possessing dominion over every aspect of our inheritance in Christ.

As we follow the Spirit of the Lord, legal possession becomes actual possession; the position becomes the experience.

To be continued.